SKATELAB (Laboratorio de skate) was a project that temporarily appropriated an unused pavillion in the back of a museum, creating a space dedicated to play and skating to explore the contemporary culture of skateboarding in Mexico City. It was an initiative that launched as part of my three month residency at Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, a contemporary art museum located in Mexico City.

The architecture of Skatelab was deliberately minimalistic, serving as an alternative if not an antithesis to the rise of skatepark construction in Mexico City. Designed to be adapted towards experimentation, expansion and appropriation, the space was equipped with only a few permanent elements and the rest consisted of temporary objects and things that could be appropriated for skating.

The goal of Skatelab was two-fold:

(1) Investigate how large-scale and institutional urban design initiatives such as the construction of state-of-the-art skateparks, which create highly scripted and programmed play spaces, effectively deprive skaters of their ability to exercise their spatial and creative agency in public spaces: the streets, plazas, sidewalks, parks and the act of appropriating of other unused, abandoned and/or forgotten spaces.

(2) Create a channel through which non-institutional actors, such as skaters, can enter and creatively occupy spaces with institutional power, such as museums, and develop new working relationships in between.

SKATELAB also contributed to creating different social dynamics with the public or non-skaters, most visible in the ways through which the passerby in the park started to occupy the space for recreational and entertainment purposes (such as playing on the ramps without using a skateboard, or simply coming to Skatelab to watch skaters skate). The museum produced rules, policies, and signages in reaction to the new socio-spatial relations produced through the act of skaters entering institutional spaces.

On February 25th 2019, the Skatelab ramps were passed onto Veronica, an extremely talented young Mexican skater, and transported to her house where she plans to open her own skate school for youth. The spirit of Skatelab continues to grow and hopes to take on other forms of design practices inside and outside of cultural institutions.

A special thanks goes out to all of the skaters, the artists, and the many photographers and videographers who have documented this experience and helped make it possible; my skate mentors Hesner Sánchez, Martin Núñez, Erik Carranza and Oyuki Matsumoto, and Caleb Gutiérrez who supported the crucial maintenance of the ramps; and last but not least, my extremely supportive team at Taller Tamayo including Manuel Alcalá, Brenda Garcia and Eva Cardenas to name a few.

DESDE LA PERSPECTIVA DE was also a 3-month project that collaborated with Francisco Lerios from Taller Tamayo and engaged the guards who work inside the museum, investigating their everyday realities, understandings and observations of the museum. The project wished to comment on the peculiarities of the contemporary art museum. It is on one hand a cultural institution that operates under the mission of collecting and diffusing a particular kind of knowledge that invites us to explore contemporary themes and issues; on the other, a tightly surveilled and restrictive space that does not necessarily allow us to do whatever we want.

We focused on the constraints that the museum guards experience on a daily basis, such as rules that prevent them from engaging in any sort of creative activity that may consequently distract them from their work, and developed site-specific methods and techniques for research. The outcome involved a magazine that was circulated publicly in Museo Tamayo and invited visitors to explore an alternative reading of the museum from the perspective of the people who work there everyday.

This line of research was inspired by what I learned over the summer working with skaters in Museo Tamayo (Mexico City), especially through observing the amount of enthusiasm the skateboarding community expressed towards intervening in fine art spaces. I was curious to know more about the relationship between these two disparate seeming yet equally artistically-inclined populations, especially in regards to their obsession and passion towards forwarding a certain cultural aesthetic.

In skateboarding, cultural aesthetics are delivered through means of videos that show off technical dexterity and precision of the skater’s engagement with urban space, in the forms of magazine ads, posters, zines and graphics that emphasize the countercultural and anti-capitalistic attitude of skating, and through the likes of the shared stylistics, tricks, looks, fashion, lingo, perspective or behaviors of skaters that became replicated by millions of practitioners in cities all around the world.

Whereas skaters, who live on the margins of mainstream culture and are often socioeconomically excluded from the Marxist society, often find themselves in a position where it becomes crucial to use their very bodies and existence to propagate their cultural aesthetics, fine art spaces on the contrary possess the means to construct physical architecture such as white box galleries to physically represent their aesthetic on an institutional scale and level.

Some of the original questions I brought into this conceptual space hit a dead-end (e.g., why do skaters love skating in galleries - besides the fact that the floor is super sleek?). But the various media studies were useful in 2 ways:

(1) I was able to play with different tools to visualize the creative processes and fundamental difference between skaters and museums, using things like collages, diagrams, flipbooks, illustrations, and typography. The GIFs, for instance, were first created as a way to emphasize the precise moment where skateboarding could be considered a political act (through how the skaters orient and use their bodies specifically in ways that allows them to subversively create conditions for play), but then evolved to provide context as to how both skaters and museums use construction as a delivery method to produce culture, which ended up also being a dead-end, but was an interesting concept to toy with.

(2) I realized that museum guards, and not museums, had a lot more in common with skaters than I initially thought. This insight led to a current project I’m working on: the guard and the city.

The project was also useful in delineating the history of institutional critique that was helpful for writing about my work in museums. Essentially, skate + museum studies served to create a critical through-line for my next set of research questions. What is the role that design can play to support non-institutional actors in negotiating greater spatial agency in institutional spaces? What can negotiations (that advance one’s agency or understanding of self through the reproduction of spatial meaning) look like as a form of spatial engagement – and what are its material and immaterial manifestations, histories, and implications?

anatomy of ice cube

Ice cubes were crafted in Perfect Cube silicone mold to provide equally melting surfaces. Red food dye was added in the process of freezing. Paper towels were carefully adhered to individual wooden frames then inserted into a larger frame. The ice cube was placed on the top frame and during melting, resulted in creating a print-like effect as huge colored beads of droplets dripped down and inhabited the paper towels. The architecture of this technology and the melting ice cube made it possible to document an almost anatomical trace of the melting process.

I like to think of this project akin to an automated silkscreen printing machine. Recently, I am interested in experimenting with automated processes of drawing/writing, and there is a lot of potential in going back and redeveloping this prototype.

viewing privileges

Play has the power to transform existing social relations and invert hierarchy, control and power, and design can potentially create playful avenues for non-institutional actors to negotiate greater spatial agency in institutional spaces.

Using play to transform the existing social relations that determine creative agency based on seniority, the Media Design Practices studio space became a testing ground for a playful activity. A series of instructions were designed, organized, and enclosed in individual envelopes, and people in the graduate studio took one of these envelopes depending on their rank of seniority (from youngest to oldest: dev, concept, thesis, advisor, faculty, coordinator, director, and chair).

The instructions were specifically designed in a way so that it could challenge and invert the system of seniority, a hierarchical system embedded in my studio that privileges the spatial agency of older actors than those who are younger. Mobilizing the people in the studio space as the medium for spatial organization (much like how I have done with the museum guards), the instructions commanded each of the actors to move in a way that allowed dev students to have the best access to the works, or the most viewing privilege, and the department chair to have the least.

Each set of instructions had 2 variables: one about how much time you will be distracted away from the show by having to do something else; the other, forcing you to take alternative spatial relationships, making it harder for you to move freely - for instance, the chair had to stand 10 feet away from all dev students to allow them to have the best viewing experience.

To further maintain the authority of the dev students for the duration of the game, extra rules were enforced. People who were not dev students needed to get their authorization in the form of a signature to negotiate any alterations to their instructions, and the dev students were instructed not to pass on this tool of power - the pencil - to other members of the studio.

This activity was a site-specific extension of some things I observed a few days earlier in Museo Tamayo, when attending the premiere of Germán Venegas show. Upon interacting with the museum guards during and after the show (the people who watch us watch the show), I realized how much viewing privilege and freedom I had over them upon hearing them lamentably mentioning how they would have loved to see the works longer. The museum guards’ agency in the space of the museum is controlled by institutional actors, and their ability to see the works (how, when and to what extent) is dependent on others’ movements in the space (see diagrams below the photos).

The next step is to feed this idea of spatial negotiation back into the museum, and construct arrangements that will allow for the museum guards to gain greater spatial agency. There are works in progress (here and here) where I’m trying this out with different spaces and actors.

How can sharing an awkward experience with someone inverse the negative feelings (such as embarrassment and discomfort) associated with awkwardness? During Confab, a tradition of collaborative rapid making in Graduate Media Design Practices, my group was interested in the idea of celebrating awkwardness using various media and methodologies. What started with a joking-around, "let's make people do awkward things with each other" quickly turned into a series of rather thoughtful design experiments that took risks.

We carefully structured a sequence of exercises that increased in awkwardness as two people got together in pairs and cleared each one. During “human furniture” pairs will take randomly chosen awkward poses and engage in a 45-second conversation while holding their respective poses. Followed by “the tunnel” where your eyes are dead-locked with David’s, who has the most killer poker face on earth and your laughs echo emptily in the box while your other buddy tries to peer in with mirrors. The worst is the end, where Justeen ties your elbows and wrists together and you have to get really close to your partner to be able to go through a double light-sensor powered obstacle.

There was a “calculated” sequence that would turn the feeling of awkwardness into a catharsis through sticking through it together, but the outcomes of the awkward activities were way beyond our designerly expectations.

Sometimes you can only design half of the surprise and the other half comes back to surprise you.

JUEGO ES PODER is a design research project that explored a taxonomy of play in urban space in Mexico City inspired by the ways skaters creatively dispute the conventional use of the city. The project looked at play as a physical engagement that creates an orientation to urban space that allows people to reimagine and embody alternate relationships, affordances and opportunities.

The project activated play as a method to:

(1) Physically confront the rules and perceptions around conventional uses of public spaces such as parks, plazas, and sidewalks and explore how improvisational play can reveal the incongruence between the imagined use of public space and the actual praxis of it

(2) Challenge the solution-based approach of government-built play spaces (that may or may not be intended as youth containment strategies) and demonstrate alternative playful opportunities in spaces not specifically designed for play

Working closely with young skaters in Mexico City to reimagine the regulated use of public spaces such as plazas, parks, and streets, the project applied the informal and improvisational approaches of skating that temporarily rendered elements of the built environment into a personal space of exploration.

Skaters do not just play in space; they play with space. Inspired by the way skaters make space pliable through their activities, the project identified new forms of play that activate unexplored layers of social interactions in the city.

coatcheckplay

COATCHECKPLAY was a 2-month exploration and 1-week deployment of ideas that evolved around using play as a way of creating new types of cultural practices in the museum. In the case of the final prototype, the focus was around a moment of intimate exchange that happens between visitors and the museum - the coat check.

Wooden cubes made from sheets of lasercut MDF contained things such as rice, sugar, nuts and bolts, squiggly pasta, and bells. They produced different kinds of sounds when shaken.

The simple intervention created a series of new interactions between the visitors and the coat check staff, and some small games were invented in the coat check during times when there were no visitors.

Special thanks to the coat check staff for generously willing to participate in this design experiment and for helping me collect documentation.

juego reconstructivo (reconstructive play)

Year2018

TypeIndependent design research

PartnersExhibited as part of De todos, para todos at MUCA (Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte) en UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico)

JUEGO RECONSTRUCTIVO was deployed for 10 days in the Plaza de los Pinos in Facultad de Arquitectura in UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Mexico City’s largest public research university.

Inspired by landscape architect and sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s largely unrealized yet provocative playscapes, this open-ended and abstract sculpture provoked passerby and visitors to create their own definition of play. The sculpture was perceived as many things: an apparatus, objet d’art, device, equipment, and an invasion. Nevertheless, playable.

Students and the public expressed curiosity almost immediately upon encountering this mysterious sculpture (UNAM is famous for being open to the public; it even has its own city, Ciudad Universitaria). Its playful potential was amplified by the placement of a basket that was stacked to the brim with balls of all shapes, textures and sizes. Many types of games and play were invented on the spot, lasting anywhere between 5 seconds to 50 minutes.

mapping (the unknown city)

Years2015 - present

TypeVarious

ToolsVarious

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MAPPING (THE UNKNOWN CITY) is a collection of architectural drawings, cartography and visual representations of space that span various media and methodologies. The work tends to break away from conventional systems of geographical notations, particularly the Cartesian grid, and experiments with layering, emphasis, text, codified notations, and poetic notations of space. Some maps have used spatial analysis tools such as GIS to reveal and connect disparate urban phenomena such as the geographical repercussions of mass incarceration.

What role do you play, or actively discard, in the pursuit of the unknown city? Where does the mapping begin and where does it end?

When the connection a phone user has with their phone is prioritized over the real human interaction they (could) have with someone right beside them, the phone user is typically viewed as impolite. How can the language of phone use be used to empower the space of the phone user instead of stigmatizing them as being socially dysfunctional?

INTERFACE was designed to allow the phone user to have complete ownership of their social territory when it comes to “having to” interact with non-phone users during phone use. It continuously makes fun of the non-phone user: when the proximity sensor senses a person, it notifies the phone user via their phone and the phone user can either flip the “BUSY” or “SUP” switch.

The idea was inspired by observing how people using their phones will face other people at a constant 45 degrees angle, signifying with their bodies how they are not completely available but also not completely unavailable. I wanted to push this dynamic to the extreme.

The act of hiding suggests that someone feels uncomfortable, unsatisfied, and/or unsafe in the space that they are exposed to, and that they are attempting to rewrite the space by overlaying a different reading of the space on the existing one. Even in school - a place that is primarily intended to benefit the social and individual needs of children - hiding can be observed on many levels.

For instance: (1) children hiding behind other children because they don’t want to get called on during class; (2) children locking themselves in the safe confines of spaces such as bathroom cubicles and lockers from their fear of being bullied; and (3) children trying to hide from everything and everyone by pretending to be asleep at their desk during breaks and class.

A self-deployable unit, STOREY empowers children to become authors of the spaces they inhabit by allowing them to curate a common setting – lunchtime – and to re-design the act and space of eating.

The child will open STOREY, disguised as a textbook, to find tools such as a magnifying glass (with a book reading/pathfinding light), a surface scratcher “pen”, earplugs, and a way-finding map among others. A strategically designed section contains place setting for their lunch + condiments to host a prêt-à-porter eating experience.

Upon meal completion, STOREY can be locked up for safety and carried in the user’s arms or in their backpack without appearing conspicuous. Book and keys can be given to a close accomplice for two or more users to share their STOREYs.

The project aimed to encourage collective territorialization (and perhaps privatization) of spaces in schools by giving children the functional and emotional stability to breakaway from the uniform and preset scripts of eating lunch as a public, synchronized, and place-specific experience.

50 design projects

Year2018

TypeGraduate studio (thesis)

ToolsPhone call, post its, marker

LocationGraduate Media Design Practices Studio (Pasadena, CA)

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To make something out of the (messy) intersection of design, architecture, play, skating, skaters, museums, museum guards, and power plays, I made a tool that would help me generate potential projects as a way to just test things out: because sometimes you hit a point where you are just so stuck, that you need to unravel to move forward.

After playing this game, I would say it is a good method to get out of a creative rut, and discover through-lines that were previously untouched. I would recommend it to my future self when I am in situations where I need to pivot. The outcome of the activities (the 50 design briefs) need some lifting to become refined into actual research questions, but does definitely provide some interesting and crazy conceptual directions.

1. First, take about 10 minutes to write down as many relevant problems (research questions) that you have right now. Or problems that you care about and want to advance in some shape or manner. Then, do the same to write down as many relevant facts (observations or insights) from your current research. These are essentially things that you have learned and would want to develop further.

Together, these two elements constitute a potential design brief, or hints for potential design projects.

3. Go through steps 1-2 until you have 50 of these.

4. Work a bit more on the briefsso that they become useable. For instance:

How can blind spots of security cameras become an opportunity for play in museums? What are other blind spots that exist in the museum and can they be activated as well? (refined brief)

5. Do this process with all of the 50 briefs but do so as you identify the ones that seem most relevant, conceptually new, or provocative. Some of them you will find impossible to refine so you can skip these. (For instance, in my list of 50, you can see I skipped developing #4)

6. Analyze and choose the ones to move forward with. Sometimes you will move forward with none in particular but the process might have given you new through-lines or questions.